The English title for Mia Hansen-Love’s new film is Goodbye First Love. The original French title is Un amour de jeunesse.

You don’t need to know much French to realize the English version isn’t a direct translation. It means something almost entirely different, suggesting finality and regret. The French title properly translates as Young Love, which is more hopeful and wistful.

It’s no accident. Hansen-Love brings this kind of emotional ambiguity to her work, her three features that make up the Aug. 23-25 retrospective in her honour at TIFF Bell Lightbox, part of the Summer in France series. The 31-year-old French writer/director is coming to Toronto to present her films, which she now views as an accidental trilogy.

“I’m very happy with the English title because I chose it!” Hansen-Love says over the long-distance line, laughing.

“I must confess, in certain cases, I like having two titles for my films. When the films are released in other countries, you have the feeling that they have a second life and, to me, this idea of having another title has to do with that.

“It’s like a double identity. A second chance, or something like that.”

Second chances and double lives are common themes in Hansen-Love’s films. Her 2007 feature debut Tout est pardonné (All is Forgiven) traverses the rocky terrain of a cocaine-addicted father seeking reconciliation with his daughter.

She followed this in 2009 with Le père de mes enfants (Father of My Children), in which a wife and young family struggle to stay together after an extreme paternal action. The film won the Jury Special Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Her latest and most personal film, Un amour de jeunesse (Goodbye First Love), mines mixed emotions in the youthful highs and lows of a teenaged girl who wants to commit and a boy who doesn’t. Many a tear-stained diary can attest to the truth of the tale; Hansen-Love was casting from bittersweet personal memories when she hired 16-year-old Lola Créton for the female lead.

Hansen-Love eschews high drama and plot contrivance — she doesn’t even like using flashbacks to fill in back stories. She favours naturalistic performances, often using untested actors willing to flow with stories that have a river’s steady pull, frequently drawn from events in her own life.

After just three features, she’s won kudos from critics and festival programmers the world over. TIFF director Piers Handling describes her as “a master of delicate emotional terrain seen from a woman’s point of view.”

“So many viewers have been telling me that my films were very feminine that I had to accept it,” she says.

“But I don’t know. It’s part of the infinite number of characteristics that make you a person but, ultimately, I think the most important thing is who you are and not what is your gender or your (sexual) orientation.

“I think too many films and film critics are determined by this issue — if it’s a film by a man or a woman and if it’s a gay film or straight film. I don’t like this idea. I think we can have a wider perspective on humanity.”

She’s also reluctant to pick sides in the debate over whether female directors are under-represented behind the camera and at film festivals. Controversy erupted at Cannes this year when the 22 competitors for the Palme d’Or were announced, and none of them were women. The previous year had seen a record four women competing for the Palme, making the perceived shutout all the more painful.

“During Cannes, I received emails asking about my view on this and I felt quite embarrassed because I don’t feel that there is any kind of discrimination,” Hansen-Love says firmly.

“To me, maybe there are some problems about how films are selected in Cannes, but I think (the controversy over women) throws the attention to something that is not at all the real problem. The problem is more about the industry and how (filmmakers) get inside Cannes.

“It’s more about the star system; that’s the real issue to me. This year, maybe there were fewer films done by female filmmakers. But the year before, the films you heard the most about were made by women. So it really just depends on the year.”

Perhaps because this actress-turned-director is married to a male filmmaker, Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Summer Hours), Hansen-Love is less inclined to point accusing fingers at the opposite sex. She met him at age 18, when he cast her in his 1998 film Fin août, début septembre (Late August, Early September). The couple has a 2-year-old daughter.

But Hansen-Love’s worldview has been remarkably consistent over the years, and she’s comfortable working in a man’s domain. A decade ago, she began contributing to the male-dominated French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma after dropping out of acting studies at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris.

“I’ve never felt that I was treated differently because I was a woman,” she says.

“Really! I don’t know how it would have been if I’d been a man, because I’m a woman. I’m not saying it’s easy (for women), but I think the difficulties I had to face were not determined by the fact that I was a woman.”

Her reluctance to draw dividing lines also helps explain her dislike of flashbacks in her movies. There are times when a viewer might wish she’d connect the dots a little more directly, but that’s just not how she proceeds.

“I am moved by the feeling of truth and reality more than anything and, to me, flashbacks have to do with cinema and never with truth. It’s very contrary to my own feeling of life and what is past, what is present, and what is future.

“This is not due to principle or ideological reasons. It’s a very spontaneous reaction due to the strong relationship I have to the past and the present and future. You cannot make the past come back. It’s some kind of betrayal that I feel is not very honest and, to me, it leads me away from the feeling of reality — and that’s the one thing I’m looking for with films.”

Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

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